Christopher Hitchens - Mortality

What happens, you may have been told, is a “simulation” of the sensation of drowning. Wrong. What happens is that you are slowly but inexorably drowned. And if at any point you manage to evade the deadly drip of water, your torturer will know. He or she will then make a minute but effective adjustment. When I interviewed my torturers later I was particularly interested in this aspect of matters. Oh yes, they said with mild bragging, we have lots of little moves and shakes and twists that will get the job done and not leave a mark. Again, you note this pride in technique and its almost humanist tone of professional expression. The language of torturers…

The reason I have decided to write about this in the present context is as follows. Ever since I composed and published the original essay, which was some time before I was diagnosed with esophageal cancer, I had been suffering from some form of post-torture stress that probably has yet to be classified or named. In my own case at any rate, it has to do with asphyxiation. And the “aspiration” of moisture can trigger a flood of panic and has become imbricated with the larger and deadlier symptoms of my various pneumonias. And every day, I am forced to prepare myself to be tube-fed through an apparatus of liquid nourishment, or to be washed to different degrees of immersion, or to be otherwise made highly vulnerable. So I am very fortunate indeed that I have never had to hear the torturer’s odious whisper, or to shrink at the thought that I am only a wrinkle or a twist away from severe fear and “distress” (a word quite high on the euphemism scale). But I do now know how the trick could be pulled.

I have been cycled through various great American hospitals in the course of my experience, at least one of which is famous for being operated by a historic religious order. In each of the rooms of this hospital, from no matter what perspective you lie in bed, the commanding view is decidedly that of a large black metal crucifix embedded tenaciously in the wall. I had no special objection to this on one level, because it really did little more than repeat the name of the hospital itself. (I tend not to pick my fights with the chaplains’ departments until I have a proper point to make. In Texas, for instance, in a purpose-built brand-new facility that took the towers to the level of more than two dozen, I got them to agree in principle that it was slightly idiotic not to boast of a thirteenth floor but instead to skip from twelve to fourteen. Surely nobody checks in here to complain of cosmic fears generated by a number, or would check out because of it: We seem incidentally quite unable to discern how this dank little superstition ever got started.)

However, I also happen to know that it was a practice, during the wars of religion and the campaigns of the Inquisition, to subject the condemned to a compulsory view of the cross until they had died. In some of the fervent paintings of the grand autos-da-fe , or “acts of faith,” not I think excluding some of the burnings alive captured by Goya on the Plaza Mayor, we see the flame and the smoke arising from the vicinity of the victim, and then the cross itself held grimly aloft before his closing eyes. I have to say that, even if this is now done only in a more “palliative” fashion, it makes me feel disapproving on the grounds of its earlier sadomasochistic associations. There are banal, quotidian hospital and medical practices that remind people of state-sponsored torture. In my own case, there are also practices that I can’t separate from the hell of earlier ones. Even the thought of some misapplications of water or gas, such as a moisturized or “nebulized” breathing-treatment kit, can be more than enough to make me feel critically ill. When I was first thinking of a possible title for this book, I considered annexing the line “Obscene as cancer,” from Wilfred Owen’s terrifying poem about death on the Western Front, “Dulce et Decorum Est.” The action describes the reaction of a group of exhausted British stragglers, caught in the open during a gas attack for which they are ill-prepared:

When I, too, am sometimes forced into premature awareness by a smothering or choked nightmare sensation, I realize how essential it is that the frontiers of medicine be so tightly and punctiliously patrolled. I appreciate that within the profession itself there be not the least concession to any relaxation of that standard. The operators of that famous hospital should be ashamed of the historic role played by their order in the appalling legalization and application of torture, and I have the same right if not duty to be equally ashamed of the official policy of torture adopted by a government whose citizenship papers I had only recently taken out.

REMEMBER, YOU TOO ARE MORTAL”—HIT ME AT THE top of my form and just as things were beginning to plateau. My two assets my pen and my voice—and it had to be the esophagus. All along, while burning the candle at both ends, I’d been “straying into the arena of the unwell” and now “a vulgar little tumor” was evident. This alien can’t want anything; if it kills me it dies but it seems very single-minded and set in its purpose. No real irony here, though. Must take absolute care not to be self-pitying or self-centered.

Always prided myself on my reasoning faculty and my stoic materialism. I don’t have a body, I am a body. Yet consciously and regularly acted as if this was not true, or as if an exception would be made in my case. Feeling husky and tired on tour? See the doctor when it’s over!

Lost fourteen pounds without trying. Thin at last. But don’t feel lighter because walking to the fridge is like a forced march. Then again, the vicious psoriasis/excema pustules that no doctor could treat have gone, too. This must be some impressive toxin I’m taking. And a mercy for sleep purposes… but all the sleep-aids and blissful dozes seem somehow a waste of life—there’s plenty of future time in which to be unconscious.

The nice men with the oxygen and the gurney and the ambulance very gently deporting me across the frontier of the well, in another country.

The alien was burrowing into me even as I wrote the jaunty words about my own prematurely announced death.

Now so many tributes that it also seems that rumors of my LIFE have also been greatly exaggerated. Lived to see most of what’s going to be written about me: this too is exhilarating but hits diminishing returns when I realize how soon it, too, will be “background.”

Julian Barnes on John Diamond…

A bout de soufflé… Seberg/Belmondo . Funny how one uses “breathless” or “out of breath” so casually. At Logan [airport]—can’t breathe! Next stop terminal.